WHERE I AM

          I am sitting at my desk, in my office of the house we rent in Kerrville, Texas, United States, planet earth.  I am sixty-two years and 213 days old. My first residence was on

Overland Avenue, Los Angeles

; then a rented yellow house in Rustic Canyon, followed by the house my parents built in 1955. I lived there until I was nineteen-years old. Then I moved into a white shack next to the Malibu Feed Bin where I met Charles Manson who didn’t impress me one bit.

          From there I spent several months in an apartment in Venice that had a salami monster under the floor.  Then Tom and I moved to Beverly Glen Canyon where I’d hike up my antique white nightgown to climb the dusty hill, and walk across a wooden plank to the artist’s studio, which had no running water. If I needed to pee, I squatted outside. When our landlord got busted, Tom and I fled to North Hollywood and lived in a house with linoleum floors and ate fake turkey on Thanksgiving. We’d become vegetarians because after Tom got out of the draft—he only ate grapes for a month–his sister, to celebrate, presented him with a bloody steak, so he swore off meat. 

          A pink summer cottage in Mount Shasta followed. I baked bread, listened to Joni Mitchell and cried. Tom needed to have his wisdom teeth pulled so we stayed with my sister in Pacific Heights, San Francisco, in the basement apartment of a mansion owned by her best friend from school.  When Tom went back to LA to try to get a record contact, I went to Wales to visit Katherine and got a telegram saying I had to move out. 

          I sublet a room in an apartment on Potrero Hill from a meditator who decided I was a whore because I had three different guys visit me that month. I moved into the living room of an old mansion on

Laguna Street

where we all shared the kitchen and bathrooms. I got strep throat and herpes and a yeast infection so I returned to Rustic Canyon, worked for two months at United Professional Planning, met Roger, went to Wales (again) and fell in love with him through letters.  

          I stayed with him on

Hearst Street

in Berkeley until I found an apartment in San Francisco near the Opera House that had cockroaches running up and down the walls.  I found a kitten but it was schizo so I gave it to the SPCA. I got strep throat (again) and this time Roger felt sorry for me, so he let me move in with him.

          Somehow he met a guy who let us live for free if we managed an apartment building where one of the tenants was a drug dealer who never paid his rent. After we evicted him we found the balcony covered in dog shit, and crayon marks all over the walls, boxes of sugary cereal under the sink, and bullets in the refrigerator.

          For a while we lived on the ground floor of a lovely sunny house on Benvenue with lavender wisteria dripping over the wide front porch. But after my tonsillectomy they found I had hepatitis, so I returned to Rustic Canyon and once again my mother nursed me back to health.

          I rented an apartment on

Yale Street

in Santa Monica with a sauna and a pool and when Roger said he was in love with me I told him he had to marry me.  So we got married and rented an apartment on

4^th Street

in Ocean Park until we thought we should buy a house, which we did, in Olivenhain, four miles from Encinitas in San Diego County. It came with a pool, twenty-one fruit trees and grapevines where I found him sound asleep one morning.

          Seventeen years later he told me he had been addicted to Demerol but then I didn’t know what was the matter. One day he confided he’d been working for the Israeli secret service and could fulfill his obligation by going to Israel, living on Kibbutz, and I could come too, if I would convert.  I looked out the window toward the lovely view of Rancho Santa Fe and looked at my cats lounging on the floor. I knew I could leave the house but I could not leave my cats, so I didn’t go with him.

          Once again Mother came to my rescue. She found me an apartment in Santa Monica, a sweet, old two-story with a courtyard and found me a job and for the next thirteen years I worked at the Sand and Sea Club. I fell in love, had my heart broken, became a “real” poet, became an aerobic teacher, wrote a novel. Nine of those years I lived in an apartment on PCH, became a Laker fan, then bought a condo because Mother thought it was time I had some financial security. She gave me the down payment.

          When the Club closed I drove up to Ahwahnee to visit an ex-boyfriend. Sitting on his boat, in the middle of Bass Lake, I looked at the pine-covered mountains and sunlight sparkling on the water and decided to move to Oakhurst.

          After a year I met John, got married, moved into the house he had rented in Yosemite Lakes Park. Then for seven years we lived in a shady white chalet. I did community theater and John looked for the perfect property for us to build a house.

          Eventually he found it: seventeen acres of manzanita, bull pine, huge oaks and the most beautiful views of the high sierras, the San Joaquin Valley and the Coastal range. I was so happy there with my cats, my above-ground pool, the steep hills, wildflowers I knew by name. But we lost our jobs, lost money, lost my father, lost our home.

          We moved to Texas where we are now, where I am now, just before dinner on a Thursday night, with an unknown number of years spread before me, a blur, a mystery. And Mother, who always came to my rescue, is now in an assisted living facility overlooking Santa Monica Bay. She suffers from long-term and short-term memory loss and eats lots of chocolate because, as she told me today, if she’s going to die, she wants to die happy.